Side Projects

I make a lot of mostly useless things.

From building a Lego model of the lab to making a quilt out of conference t-shirts to building a an entire website, I enjoy making stuff. While a lot of these side projects might be superficially useless to most people, these projects taught me skills like web development, programming with domain experts, and how to survive the incredible frustration of learning new things on my own.

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Lazy Baker

Python
Django
Wagtail CMS

It's cookbook-style recipe website using the Wagtail CMS framework for Django. It was a fun challenge for myself to build the whole thing in a weekend and a week's worth of evenings. I was bad at keeping track of recipes from various cookbooks, websites, and a very poorly organized recipe box. Clearly, the easiest solution to this problem was to build an entire website from scratch.

Suture Score

Python
Ruby
Matlab
JavaScript

Suture Score is an application to provide instant, objective feedback on suturing technique to surgical trainees. To prepare for assessments and surgery, students need as much practice as possible. Using innovative image recognition techniques, Suture Score aims to enhance trainees' practice to improve their suturing skills.

Suture Score was created at the NHS-sponsored TELHack hackathon, where it won first place. It's now being tested for further development and use within the NHS.

VROOM: Vacuum Robot Overcoming Obstacles and Messes

Python

VROOM was a final project for an artificial intelligence course. It is a simulated robotic vacuum cleaner designed to explore its environment, classify the types of obstacles it encounters, and plan an efficient path to clean dirt in expected locations. It makes use of many classical AI algorithms such as A* search and naive Bayes classification.

Blurber

Python

Blurber is a web app to create fake book blurbs. Using the titles and descriptions of the top 300 books in every category on Amazon, this app will generate randomly generate new book blurbs with the power of Markov chains.

Blurber was created with Mustafa Camurcu and Shreyas Mahimkar at HackBeanpot 2015, where it was a finalist.